“Nor does a dead man carry money away. You can die as well as me.”
“Both of us can die,” I agreed, “or both of us can live. You want the money for what it can buy you in Mexico. But you know and I know that Bob Heseltine will follow you for it, and then he will kill you…if not, you will live in fear from now on.
“If I take the money you will be as you were. You will be here. You will have what you have had, and you will have no fear.”
For a moment I paused, and then I added, “I think I want that money more than you do. I think I might die to get it, but I do not believe you want to die to keep it.
“In death,” I added, “there are no pretty women. There is no tequila, no food, no good horses, no sunshine or rain. A little money lasts a very short time, but death is for always.”
“You are a philosopher,” Villareal said.
“I am a man who has been robbed, a man who feels a debt to the poor men to whom this money belongs.” Quietly, there in the dark, holding the gun in my hand, I told him of the hard-working men down in Texas, the children who must go to school, the wives who needed shoes, the hard times all must face.
“I see,” he said quietly. “I did not know from whom the money had been taken.”
“I have followed Heseltine for many months,” I said. “My father has died because of this money. Doc Sites was shot and seriously wounded because of it. Al Cashion was killed, and another man too. As long as I live I shall follow him.”
He dropped his gun into his holster. “I am a bad man, señor, but not so bad as to rob the poor. Take the money. Only a little of it is here. The girl has it.”
He handed me the saddlebags, and I took them warily. “Thank you, amigo,” I said. “The men to whom this money belongs will speak well of Villareal. I shall tell them of your courtesy, and that you are a caballero.”
“Gracias,” he said. “And now, if you will permit?”
Backing from the door, he closed it behind him. Saddlebags in hand, I went out the other door, crossed to my horse, and rode back toward the Plaza.
I was coming from a street into the Plaza when suddenly I drew up.
It was Hampton Todd, and he had a rifle on me. “All right, where is she?” he demanded.
“Who do you want?”
“I want that damned girl, and you know where she is, damn you! Tell me, or I’ll cut you down!”
“I wish I knew where she is,” I replied calmly. “I have been looking for her, and for the man she rides with.”
“You’re that man! You know where she is, and I want her. And I want my money.”
“Your money?”
“My money!” He shouted it at me. Windows were opening. His fury was attracting attention, but it did me no good. The man was trembling with rage, and he was ready to fire. At the slightest move, he would, and at that range he could scarcely miss.
“I do not know where she is, or what was between you.” I kept my voice even. “I do not deny that I followed her here, looking for the man who robbed me.”
“A likely story. There was no other man—you were the one!”
“Put the rifle down,” I said, “and we can talk. The man you want is the man I want. And where he is, the woman will be.”
“No!” He lifted the rifle again. “Tell me, or I’ll kill you!”
I felt the whap of the bullet past my ear. I saw him jerk as I heard the report. His own rifle exploded, and the bullet missed me only by inches, and then he was staggering, falling.
“He killed me!” He spoke the words loudly and clearly, pointing at me. And then he rolled over into the dust.
Men were running. Somebody yelled, “Get a rope!”
Sheriff Rowland was suddenly beside me. “All right,” he said. “Get off that horse.”
“Sheriff, before I move I ask you to check my rifle and my pistol. You will find that neither one has been fired.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Don’t listen to him, Rowland!” The man who spoke had obviously been drinking. His face was red and ugly-looking. A dozen other men were around him. “Hamp named him—pointed right at him!”
“Please, Sheriff,” I said quietly.
He drew my Winchester from the scabbard. The barrel was cold, it held a bullet, the chamber was loaded. One by one he ejected the cartridges.
“As you see,” I said, “the rifle has not been fired. Now the pistol, before anybody touches it, including me.”
He threw a hard look at me, but he did check the pistol, too. He held it to the light and looked through the barrel. The cylinder held five cartridges, a sixth chamber was empty, but that was the way we carried them.
“These guns have not been fired.” Rowland spoke clearly, emphatically. “This man could not have fired the shot.”
An angry sound rose from the men around us, but as the information circulated among them, it died down.
“Then who did shoot him?” Rowland demanded.
“Somebody behind me, Sheriff,” I said. “Somebody who must have been in a second-story window, or on a roof, for the bullet passed me, but killed him, and he was standing on the ground.”
The sheriff turned and looked across the Plaza. “Gone now, whoever it was. Question is, were they shooting at you or him?”
“At me,” I said, “although Todd was about to take a shot at me himself. I was trying to talk him out of it.”
“Get down and come inside,” he said. “We’ve got some talking to do.”
A deputy had come up and Rowland turned and spoke rapidly. The deputy hurriedly named five or six men in the crowd, and they scattered in the direction from which the shot seemed to have come.
Inside the Pico House we were away from the crowd, and Rowland led me into the hotel office. “Sit down,” he said. “I want the whole story.”
So I laid it out for him from the beginning. My pursuit of Heseltine, Reese, and Ruby Shaw, my discovery of her using another name here, Hampton Todd knowing some man was involved with her, and believing it was me.
“Why you?”
I shrugged. “I was probably the only one who seemed to know anything about her. I doubt if he ever saw Heseltine, so when he discovered another man was involved he thought it was me. I was a stranger in town, who knew her.”
“You think it was Heseltine who fired the shot?”
“Heseltine or Reese, shooting at me. My guess would be Heseltine. I don’t think Reese was in any shape to be shooting at anybody, and I doubt if he would have been able to get here in time. Bob Heseltine could have.”
“But he’s a gunfighter, not a back-shooter.”
“I’ve been dogging him, Mr. Rowland. I’ve been right on him. He can’t find anybody to work with him because I’m always right there, not far behind him. Nobody wants to try pulling a job when somebody is hunting them before they start, and they don’t want to get involved.”
He considered the matter, taking a cigar from his vest pocket. “Have you ever thought of something else? It might have been Ruby Shaw who tried to kill you.”
“Well,” I said, “as nearly as I can find out, she was the one who hired Al Cashion.”
“What do you know about that woman getting money from Todd?”
“Nothing at all, but she’s shrewd and she’s tough. There probably isn’t a crooked dodge she doesn’t know. He was roped in, and she might have spun him any kind of a story. Men like to brag…maybe he showed her how much cash he had. That would be like showing a hen to a hungry fox.”
He got up. “There’s no reason to hold you, but what I said before goes double. I want you out of town.”
“Thanks, Mr. Rowland. A less reasonable man, and I might have been hung out there.” I held out my hand.
“They’re a rough crowd,” he admitted, shaking my hand. “There’s a few among them I want to float out of Los Angeles the first chance I get. This town wants peace.”
The Plaza was empty again. The light of dawn was yellow in the gr
ay sky, with here and there a crimson streak. I liked the smell of the air, for the wind was from off the sea. I untied my horse and stepped into the saddle.
Rowland’s deputy came back across the Plaza alone. He took a cigar from his mouth. “It was a woman,” he said. “Went into an empty room. We could smell the perfume in there, and when she ran she forgot a glove.”
He showed it to me. It was for a small hand—a hand that could pull a trigger as well as a man’s could.
“See you,” I said, and rode out of town.
They were gone again, lost again, out in the open again.
Where would they go?
Chapter 16
*
CONCHITA WAS IN the yard when I rode up, and she came over to me as her grandfather came out of the house.
“You are well?” Her eyes searched my face. “A man passing by said there was a shooting in town.”
When I had loosened the girth I went into the house with them. Conchita put coffee on the table and her brother came to listen as I told them what had happened.
“And now amigo?” the old man asked.
“I shall ride on. Try to pick up the trail.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “I am an old man, señor, and you must forgive me, but do you not think you waste your life? Those who lost the money have given it up now; they work and think of other things. Their lives go on, as yours must also.
“It does no good to follow and follow these men. They will have their suffering. Believe me, this woman will bring evil upon them. Such a woman will never cease from evil, and those with her will suffer. Leave them to their lives, señor, and find a place for yourself. The years pass swiftly, you will be an old man, with nobody, and with nothing to look back upon but the chase.”
“It is something I must do. Sometimes I think that, just as a beaver must build dams, I must pursue these men.”
“But all is changing around you. Even I, who am an old man, see that change. From day to day the law grows stronger. Men will work together, señor, and the lawless will soon be pursued wherever they may go.”
He was right, of course. Sitting there in the cool room, I could look out on the sunlit yard and far away to the hills that bordered the sea. It was pleasant here, and there was land to be had. This valley was so beautiful it would attract people, and they would come and build homes here. It was the way of the world that nothing remains the same.
“I shall go on,” I said. “I have a little more of the money, and I shall send it back to my neighbors.”
We talked long, drank good coffee, and then with the morning gone, at noontime I tightened the cinch and stepped into the saddle. They stood in the open, on the hard-packed ground, and waved a good-bye. When I turned at last in my saddle to look back from the trail, only Conchita was still there. She lifted her hand once more, and I answered with mine.
Was it to be always so—that I should come into the lives of people, get to feel close to them, and then ride on? Would there be no end to it?
*
FOR TWO WEEKS I cast back and forth, trying all the trails that led out of Los Angeles to the east, the north, the south.
Then finally at a wayside station in the desert a man heard me speak of them and turned to me. “I saw some folks looked about like you said. A pretty blonde woman and two men. They came into Whiskey Flat from the southwest. They headed east out toward Walker’s Pass.”
We talked a little longer, and I knew he had seen them, all right. One of the men, he said, had a bad cut over his eye and another on his cheekbone. The other man, who was powerfully built, was wearing a leather coat and a black hat.
He drew me a map in the dirt outside the station, showing me Whiskey Flat, the trail to Walker’s Pass, and our own location. We were at the new railroad town of Mohave. It had been called a lot of things before that. Elias Dearborn had a stage station there as early as 1860, and later the Nadeau freight teams used to make stops there.
“The trail here,” the man said, “goes up through Red Rock Canyon toward Walker’s Pass. It ain’t much of a trail, but I come down that way yesterday, and you’ve got you a good horse. Carry plenty of water, though, and watch for rattlers. Seems to be a lot of them out this year.”
“Pack horse?” I queried.
The man shrugged. “Not much chance here. Horses are scarce. Chavez and his outlaws—he’s got the ragged end of the old Vasquez crowd trailin’ with him—they’ve stole most of the good horses around. You might pick up a mule.”
I went on, and I found the trail hot and dusty. When I had been riding about two hours it had become so hot that I knew it would be foolish to go on. I reined over to one side and rode into a small canyon where there was an island of shade forty or fifty feet across. Stepping down from the saddle, I poured a little water into my hat and let my horse drink, then tied him to some brush and settled down against the canyon wall to rest.
It was very still. My horse nibbled at brush, then closed his eyes and dozed three-legged, flicking his tail at an occasional fly.
From where I sat I could see almost half a mile of the trail as it wound up into the canyon that led to the plateau beyond. A lizard came out on a rock and studied me, his mouth gaping.
It was a place in which to sit and think about my own place in what was happening. One fact kept nudging me…I wasn’t getting anywhere. Was my pursuit of Heseltine just a way of not looking forward to the future? All the time they were running and I was following, the fact was staring me right in the face that a man may run all his life and get nowhere.
The trouble was I’d just never had a destination in mind that I wanted…and yet I did want one. As long as pa had been alive I could think about being on my own, but postponing everything until that day when I would face the world alone. Then suddenly he was dead and I had those people to repay; and chasing Heseltine was just one more way of avoiding the day when I had to do and be all those big things I’d told myself pa was keeping me from doing and being.
With hat slightly tipped over my eyes, I watched the heat waves dancing, watched the trail as it went up through the rocks, where occasional ocotillo and some stunted Joshuas grew.
All right, I said to myself, supposing you get all that money back from Heseltine, what will you do then? Was I going to be a rancher? Was I going to try gold mining?
There were a lot of things I hadn’t education enough to do, but even as I thought of that I could feel Con Judy’s eyes on me and hear his dry comment. “You can read, can’t you? If you can read, you can learn. You don’t have to go to school to get an education, although it is the best way for most of us, and anyway, all school can give you is the outline of the picture. You have to fill in the blank places yourself, later.”
That was what he would say, or something like it. The truth was that I had to face up to myself. Maybe pa had never gotten anywhere, but he never quit trying, and no matter how much he got beat down he kept on getting up.
There isn’t any bright, patent-leather world that’s always shining, no matter what you do…you have to make your own world, and your own place in it.
For the first time I checked the money in the saddlebags. There was slightly more than twelve hundred dollars. I’d keep a couple of hundred, and send the rest back to Texas.
After a while, I dozed. My horse awakened me, blowing softly.
I sat up abruptly. My horse’s ears were pricked, and he was looking along the trail. A man was coming along it on a crow-bait horse. He was looking my way.
Getting up from the ground, I tightened my cinch. The shadows were reaching out from the rocks and cliffs. The sun was low, not yet down, but the coolness had begun and I could now ride on, but I was not pleased by this meeting.
The man on the crow-bait had pulled up on the trail, waiting for me. His hands were in plain view, and he showed no danger signs, but I was wary.
Swinging into the saddle, I walked my horse down to the trail.
“Howdy!” His eyes were a w
atery blue, but there was a sharpness to them, and I was sure he had missed no detail of my outfit. “Travelin’ fur?”
“Walker’s Pass. Maybe east from there.”
“Ain’t no other way to go, onct you get there.”
“I could turn around and ride back,” I said. And if there were no tracks there, that was just what I might do.
“So you could.” His eyes clung to the saddlebags. “Been minin’?”
“Me? I’m a cowhand.” And then I added, not too honestly, for I did not want him to know too much, “I never do anything I can’t do from the back of a horse.”
“Must be dif’cult, sometimes,” he said. “I can think of a lot of things I couldn’t do a-horseback.”
When I offered no comment, we rode on in silence for some distance.
His horse was in poor shape. It had been hard-used for some time, but it had not been much of a horse to begin with. The man himself had a poor outfit, all except his rifle. That was in good shape, oiled and cared for. He had no hand gun anywhere that I could see, but I had learned not to be too trusting.
After a while he began to talk again, and his comments were prying ones. The less I said the more curious he became, so I finally said, “I like drifting. Never held to one job too long. I came out California way after a girl,” which was at least partly true, “but she took off with another man. Right now I’m just seeing country, but I’m trying to decide whether I should try to ride up Virginia City way, or turn back and ride north to Oregon. I’ve never been to either place.”
“They ain’t much. Anyways,” he suggested, “a man would have to have eatin’ money.”
I chuckled. “Not if he rides the grub-line. I can always do a mite of work for a meal, if need be. I never paid much mind to money. I’m no hand for gambling, and as long as I can eat and sleep, I’ll make out.”
“Good horse you got there,” he said. “Don’t look like no cowhand’s horse.”
“Swapped for him,” I lied. “I’d caught me a couple of wild ones, young stuff and pretty good. I swapped ’em for this one.”
But my outfit was just a little too good for a cowhand to afford, and I felt that he believed none of it. The well-filled saddlebags continued to hold his attention. If given a chance, I was sure he would try to steal everything I had, and to murder me if chance allowed.
Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Page 13
